When it comes to youth football, the quality of the infrastructure available is clearly inferior to what is present at the professional level. Many things can be identified as being huge errors. Ryan Grigson was even once quoted as saying that players coming from some college teams simply had no idea how to play at a professional level and that the youth coaches need to prepare the new generation. It is hard to argue with that and everything can be seen as starting with mistakes made by youth football coaches. Some of the very common ones are listed below.

Having Assistant Coaches That Are Personal Friends Or Family Members

Around 95% of all the youth football health coaches actually make this mistake. When the assistant coaches played high school or college football and have kids on the team, it is a certainty that arguing will appear. Dissenters tend to go against instructions and these assistant coaches often bad mouth the head coaches. As a head coach you want to trust the assistant coach. This does not happen when personal relationships are in place. Some of the main problems for head coaches are internal.

Wasting Time On Low-Priority And Conditioning Drills

What you want to do is run no-huddles during periods and put your focus on walk-throughs and tackling. The time that is available for practice is highly limited so it needs to be efficiently used. Players still end up conditioned while running the no-huddle practices. Efficient practices that have minimal standing-around times are needed for youth football. The priority is always to teach assignments and to be sure that players know them. This is especially the case when practicing during the early phase of the season.

Sadistic Football Rituals

Coaching evolved but unfortunately, some practices used in the past are still in place simply because of the fact that the coach is older. Players should not be put through sadistic football rituals. Leg raises do not help and bull in the ring is useless. To make matters even worse, these drills are put in place in order to toughen and condition players. This does not happen.

Not Enough Snap Reps

You need to give the long snappers, centers, passers, option quarterbacks and holders the reps they need to actually master assigned skills. All the 3 strings of long-snappers, quarterbacks and centers should go through at least 1,200 snap repetitions before the very first game is even played. This drastically increases results.

Not Holding A Proper Parent Meeting

With youth football you need to deal with parents. It is really important that you hold a meeting in which you explain your defensive, special and offensive teams, together with position assignment and playing time policies. A the same time, it should be mentioned that another mistake would be to not perfect or even practice the related administrative duties like how to handle getting substitutes in and then out of the game while on time. Clock-management techniques also have to be taught and practiced.